The present invention relates to an information sharing processing method, an information sharing processing program storage medium, an information sharing processing apparatus and an information sharing processing system which are used for carrying out interactive communications such as a chat system among the users through a network.
There has been widely used the so-called chat system allowing a plurality of users to communicate with each other by using personal computers connected to typically the Internet. With such a chat system, text data input by a personal computer is transmitted by the personal computer to other personal computers by way of a server to be displayed on the screen of the other personal computers.
In such a chat system, chat client software run on each personal computer of the user generally provides an input field used by the user for entering a text, a transmit button to be operated to make a request for a transmission of the text and a chat history field for showing lists of received and transmitted texts along with nick names of each user in a chronological order with the lapse of time.
The user enters the own statement to the input field as a text and then clicks the transmit button. By doing so, the user's statement is listed in the chat history field and then transmitted to other users through the network. When the statement is received by any user serving as a destination of the transmission, the user's statement is displayed in the chat history field in the personal computer of the destination user. On the other hand, the statement received from another user is displayed in the chat history field as a text in the personal computer of the user serving as a recipient of the statement.
A visual chat system is a chat system wherein an avatar representing a user participating in chats is displayed in a 2-dimensional or 3-dimensional virtual space displayed on the screen of a personal computer. An avatar of a user is expressed by an icon representing the user. On the other hand, a text chat system is a chat system wherein only nicknames of participants and texts each representing the statement voiced by a user are displayed.
By the way, in order to browse a web page stored in a WWW (World Wide Web) server and used for exhibiting information such as a text and a picture, a WWW browser is used. In a WWW server, a variety of HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) files each composing data of a web page are stored. For each HTML file, a URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is described for uniquely identifying the HTML file among other HTML files on the Internet. A URL assigned to a desired HTML file is specified by the user by using a WWW browser to acquire the HTML file from a WWW server on the Internet in accordance with an HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol). In this way, a web page can be browsed by the user as visible information.
In order to browse web pages while having chats as described above, the chat client software for implementing the chat systems and the WWW browser for browsing the web pages are activated separately and used alternately.
By the way, when a plurality of users make an attempt to induce a partner to go into the same web page while exchanging opinions through chat systems as described above, the URL assigned to the desired web page is transmitted to the partner as text information during a chat. On the personal computer used by the partner receiving the URL information, the URL must be entered and supplied to the WWW browser, causing an ongoing chat to be interrupted. As a result, there is raised a problem of inability to continue the natural tempo chat on the topical web page.
In addition, it is impossible to immediately know whether another user is browsing the same web page or has surfed up to another web page.